David Miliband, the frontrunner in the race to become Labour party leader, today described the behaviour of high finance in the runup to the banking crisis as immoral as he called for new reforms of the City.

As well as welcoming the idea of a cap on extortionate rates of interest charged by banks, Miliband said: "We must address fundamental questions about the causes of the financial crisis and how we build a new era of shared prosperity. That means rebalancing the economy, ensuring fair wages at the top and the bottom, tackling rip-off lending while extending new sources of credit to new businesses, and ensuring a more environmentally sustainable capitalism."

The shadow foreign secretary added: "The explosion of pay inequality over the last three decades, and the continuing scandal of the gender pay gap, is an ethical as well as an economic issue. Mega pay awards and bonuses, linked to activity rather than success, violate basic principles of merit and justice. We need to find ways to re-establish moral norms.

"Unacceptable concentrations of market power, as with unaccountable state power, are not just economically dangerous as we saw in the credit crunch to many in this country, they are also immoral."

Sounds good, BUT....Being my cynical old self, I was wondering if this is not just more sound-bytes and spin in the run-up to the Labour leadership election or does Miliband actually plan on trying to REALLY do something about these inequities while being the Labour leader in opposition ?

After all New-Labour had plenty of chances to fix these obvious problems during their 13 years of power, did they not ?